Best 357 quotes in «narrative quotes» category

You’ve already seen the shift of the media to blindly follow the dictates of the government.

All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.

A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What's more, Terry Malick himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.

A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods.

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.

A lot of Broadway has that immigrant narrative of America as a place where you can become something else against all odds.

An ideology can provide a satisfying narrative that explains chaotic events and collective misfortunes in a way that flatters the virtue and competence of believers, while being vague or conspiratorial enough to withstand skeptical scrutiny.

American exceptionalism is the recurring character in the nation's narrative.

Any time you write history, you insert your opinion. You pick and choose what you are going to write about. I feel really happy not inserting myself. I spend too much of my life inserting myself. It's just great to let other people carry the narrative.

Art brings a message into a room. It should make us perceive in a new way - either through color, form or narrative content - something we had not perceived before... and perhaps reveal something to you about yourself.

A trial is two narratives competing for your attention.

A short story is "a short prose narrative, requiring from a half hour, to one or two hours in its perusal...having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out.

As we begin to become aware of the narrative patterns around which we structure our lives, we learn how to take charge, revise, refine, and even completely rewrite them.

Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.

Believing in fate has probably always arisen in part because of the delights and terrors of storytelling. We have to realize--to learn--that in life we are not the readers but the authors of our own narratives.

At the heart of every faith system is a bargain: on one side there is the comfort that comes from a narrative that suggests human life has cosmic significance, and on the other a duty to yield to moral commands that can, in the moment, seem rather inconvenient.

A turning point in the public's perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'An Autobiography' of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn't the slightest inkling of what architects actually did.

Big media are all about the angle, the spin. Look to the overarching theme that runs through each and every news story. Be hip to the meta-narrative peddled.

But to read all Scripture narratives as if they were eye-witness reports in a modern newspaper, and to ignore the poetic and imaginative form in which they are sometimes couched, would be no less a violation of the canons of evangelical literalism than the allegorizing of the Scholastics was.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

Certainly, my friends and the common narrative is people are trying to shore up their own lives with regards to family planning and reproduction.

Christian nation mythologists pump themselves up with narratives of American exceptionalism and Christian domination. But sooner or later even their most devoted followers should begin to see that also depicting it as vulnerable to non-existent threats undermines the myth itself.

David Foster Wallace was a brilliant experimentalist who I deeply admire. His ability to do formalism helped me understand how to tackle stories like "Dictionary" and "Failed Revolution." "Dictionary," in particular, functions against narrative in many ways - each of the definitions are their own mini-story or prose poem, and the collection of them adds up to create a different effect than the traditional Freytagian Pyramid story.

By the way, today with digital cameras and editing on your laptop, and things like that, you can make a feature film, a narrative feature film easily for $10,000.

Chance the Rapper: if you listen to his narrative and the subject matter he covers in his music, you can see that he's strong, courageous and shows vulnerability. He asks some very poignant questions in his music and is still very melodic. The harmony and the melody of the music allows you to also come in closer.

Classical music fulfills for me the function of narrative. I spend 90 minutes a day listening to symphonic music - Beethoven to Bartók - some chamber pieces, and that's my enrichment.

Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.

Even if I made pornography, the trauma would show, though. It will always be there because it's my verité. It's my kind of narrative, it's my kind of storytelling. It's not style; it's just there.

Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.

Everything is a narrative in life. I learned that early on as a reporter at the Washington Post.

Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.

Even within single sentences, there are sudden changes of register. And when the travellers go to Venice, they see a play by Voltaire! This is a novel [Candid] which has narratives within narratives, such as when Cunégonde recounts her story.

George Orwells 1984 frequently tops surveys of our greatest books: its not a celebration of poetic language. Its decidedly anti-literary, a masterpiece of personal and political narrative sequence. And its subject matter is crucial, because what 1984 shows is that language can be a dirty trick.

Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre.

Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

God is not interested in what you think you should be or feel. He is not interested in the narrative you have construct for yourself, or that others have construct for you. He may even use suffering to deconstruct that narrative.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

History is the narrative of people searching for a place to go.

I believe a good memoir should have all of the narrative elements of a novel: character development, dialogue, descriptive language, and metaphor.

I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering.

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

I am the daughter of Mr. Neo-realism: I should gravitate towards narrative simply told, character, the truth. And I do love those movies.

I, as a person, make anything a narrative experience because I experience things linearly. The biggest question for me, is will I go through a transformation? Will I be bored or not? Is it a good or bad narrative experience?

I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative - why not a nyric or a larrative?

If a few nations step forward and begin changing the narrative of 'us and them' to 'everyone,' we will see a new dawn. If a few nations begin actually making operational a verification system we can all depend upon and push to bring all into such a system, we will all benefit.

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

I don't have anything to say in any picture. But you do, from your experience, surmise something. You do give a photograph symbolic content, narrative content... But it's nothing to worry about!

I don't know if it's something that we as a species are hardwired for or if it's more of a contemporary phenomenon related to technology and rapid dissemination of data. I did know that whatever its cause or nature, I wanted to interrogate this phenomenon. But the only way for me to do that, the only tool I have to dissect it with, is a fictional narrative.

I don't teach narrative theory by itself anymore, but I kind of use it when critiquing student manuscripts. So, it works its way in there, whether I like it or not.